They don't make them like that any more: products through the ages – in pictures

From bathing suits to bikinis, ear trumpets to implants: Products Through The Ages, a photography project by Ali Mobasser and Russell Weekes, tracks the evolution of everyday objects from the 1900s to today, and in the process opens a window on items with which we interact on a daily basis

Emotionally, the most moving transformation in this collection of products over the past hundred years is that of the hearing aid, which begins as a cumbersome ear trumpet and evolves into a robust and efficient digital device that slips unobtrusively inside the ear. Functionally, the most dramatic changes have befallen the telephone, which has morphed from a wooden box delivering a voice along a crackling line to the tiny, preternaturally powerful digital device that we now use to make calls and do so many other things, too.

Try to imagine that you have never seen a smartphone before. If you came across one for the first time, such as the iPhone in these photographs, how could you guess what it was meant to do? Looking at it would not help. Would you expect something slimmer than a cigarette packet to be more powerful than a bulldozer? And would there be anything in its appearance to suggest that it could fulfil the functions of a telephone, an alarm clock, a camera, internet browser, games console, sound system, diary, address book, satellite navigation system and countless other objects, too? No. To anyone not already familiar with it, a tiny digital device such as a smartphone would seem utterly inscrutable.

The reason so much computing power can be compressed into so little space is that generations of scientists strove first to invent the transistor, as a means of storing data, and then to make it smaller. It is a remarkable achievement, which demanded courage, vision, knowledge and skill, but were it not for design, their work might never have left the laboratory and transformed the lives of millions of people.

The elemental role of design is to act as an agent of change, which helps us to make sense of whatever is happening around us – scientific innovations, technological advances, economic developments or political trends – and to turn them to our advantage. These photographs depict one of the most powerful and familiar manifestations of that role, by illustrating design's influence on some of the objects that have been part of daily life in Britain for more than a century.

Compiled and executed by the photographer Ali Mobasser and the graphic designer Russell Weekes, each photograph reveals a product that was chosen not necessarily as an example of design virtuosity, or even for being useful, but because it was considered to be typical in a particular decade since 1900. Many of the objects were found in private collections and photographed in their owners' homes, garages or sheds. Others proved more elusive, and had to be tracked down elsewhere, often on eBay. Each one offers a glimpse of our design and social history, and collectively they demonstrate the diverse ways in which design touches our lives: how we feel, what we do, how we look and whether or not we achieve our goals.

Take the alarm clocks, which provide a potted history of design styling with nods to art deco in the 1920s and 1930s, wartime austerity during the 1940s, and the space race and Star Wars in the 1960s and 1980s respectively. Or consider how the progressively sexier contours of the mannequins and ever-skimpier cuts of the swimsuits reflect changing attitudes to sexuality, women's bodies and gender politics, with a cheeky wink towards 1990s pop culture in the Baywatch bikini.

Then there are the prams and (once they made the leap to plastic) the milk bottles, which looked for much of the last century as if they were trapped in the 1800s, until their designers were finally able to reinvent them in new materials.

What these photographs do not show is that, having helped to squeeze so much computing power into such unprepossessing receptacles as computers and smartphones, designers faced another challenge in ensuring we could operate their complex technology. In the past, we were able to work out what to do with many products from the visual clues in their appearance. Had you stumbled across, say, an old-fashioned telephone, you might have concluded that there were reasons the receiver stretched roughly from the ear to your mouth, and that your fingertip fitted so neatly inside the dial.

There is nothing so helpful to be gleaned from the smudged glass of an iPhone, which is why we depend on its designers for guidance. Tellingly, the iPhone is the only object in the collection to appear more than once – as the 2010s version of the alarm clock, recorded music, as well as of the telephone. As such, it makes an eloquent statement about the future of everyday objects such as these. Thanks to digitisation, new products are being invented and old ones are disappearing at remorseless speed. The last period of history when the same process happened on a similar scale was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when electricity was becoming accessible to millions of people, as were new contraptions such as the earliest telephones in this collection.

Digital technology is having as dramatic an effect on the objects that surround us today. As well as creating new products, it is replacing others by integrating them into the software of smartphones and computers. In theory, any object is at risk if its function can be fulfilled as efficiently, or more so, by a digital device. The alarm clock is an example. Why clutter your home – and eventually a landfill site – with one when your smartphone can do its job, and lots of others, too? The same can be said of compact discs, as well as of printed newspapers and books, pocket calculators, personal stereos, DVD players and even your door key.

Some of those imperilled objects may survive, but only if they – or, rather, their designers – can convince us that they deserve to, perhaps by being so lovely to look at or to touch, or by behaving so intriguingly, that we would miss them if they were gone.